Risorgimento, Anti-Risorgimento & BanditsTherisorgimento
is the name given to the 19th-century movement in
Italy to unite the entire Italian peninsula into a
single nation. The term covers philosophy, politics,
social unrest and military events in Italy from the
early 1800s through the last of the wars of unification,
including Italian participation in WWI, which added
Trieste and Trento to the nation. The most striking
military episode was Garibaldi’s (image, left) conquest of the South, the
Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1860, an event that led
to the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861.
Psychologically, however, Italy was not really unified
until her “natural” capital, Rome, was restored, which
took place in September, 1870. The word risorgimento, itself, means
“resurgence” and was the name of Cavour’s newspaper
(Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, 1810–1861, the first
prime minister of Italy) first published in November,
1847. The paper aimed to “reform the economic conditions
in Italy” and work for Italian “independence” and for
“social and economic cooperation” among the various
Italian states in existence at the time. There is a
certain inevitability in the word risorgimento. In
the words of Mazzini, the philosopher of the risorgimento,
similar ‘language, custom, tendencies and capacity’ are
the elements that produce a unified national culture.
The standard canon passed down to generations of Italian
school children is, thus, that the risorgimento was a
noble and successful movement to produce that national
culture.Anti-RisorgimentoThe other side of the story,
the anti-Risorgimento, is not widely known nor
transmitted as part of the canonical version of the
unification of the nation. The great Austrian diplomat,
Metternich, referred to “Italy” as “little more than a
geographical expression.” Even Massimo d’Azeglio’s
famous line (uttered in the 1860’s after the Kingdom of
Italy had been proclaimed)—“We have made Italy; now we
have to make Italians”—can be seen as a concession that
the similarities of northern and southern "language,
custom, tendencies and capacity" might be profoundly
tricky to work with. They were —and still
are.

Francis
II, the last king of
Naples, son of Ferdinand II

Who was against the unification of
Italy? Obviously, the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, with its
capital at Naples. It is true that King Ferdinand II of
Naples sent troops to help the Savoy Kingdom of Piedmont
and Sardinia against Austria in 1848 (in what is called
the First War of Independence), but he had second
thoughts and recalled them, leaving the northern armies
to go it along and lose. Ferdinand probably changed his
mind because of the presence of another great and
powerful anti-Risorgimento party, the Vatican States. In those
days, that did not mean a tiny bit of land with a nice
church (ok, it’s more than nice) on the banks of the
Tiber. It meant most of central Italy. The Vatican
States were a thousand-year-old powerful nation, had
fielded armies in the past and, later, carried on modern
diplomacy. The head of state, the Pope, could make or
break kings and emperors and often did. This was “the
temporal power of the church,” a power that Ferdinand
was unwilling to confront; he would not help bring about
the end of that “temporal power,” which was necessary if
Italy was to be united. Obviously, the Vatican, itself,
was against any movement that might lead to its demise
as a powerful state, as were the Catholic nations, Spain
and France. To all of these parties, the Risorgimento
was not at all a high-minded attempt to create cultural
unity, but a gigantic land-grab by the Savoy Kingdom of
Piedmont and Sardinia. To them, the new Kingdom of Italy
was simply the result of an invasion by a usurping
power, as illegitimate as Napoleon had been. Thus, for a
number of years in the 1860s, until the annexation of
Rome, itself, to the nation, there was a strong
anti-Risorgimento "legitimist" movement centered in
Rome, where the Pope was king and where the ex-Bourbon
court of Naples still conducted a government in exile,
waiting to be restored. [See also: The
Last Queen of Naples.]Bandits Much of the 1860s in Italy was taken
up with the task of combating “banditry” (or brigandage)
in the south in order to solidify the unity of the
nation. That is the version handed down to generations
of Italians, but the decade remains obscure in the minds
of many. Since one man’s “bandit” is another man’s
“resistance fighter,” it’s a good idea to know just what
“bandit” meant in late 19th-century Italy. First of all, there have always been
real bandits in the south, bands of roving criminals who
lived outside the law. Whether they were Robin Hoods
resisting an evil king or simply evil bastards who liked
to rob and kill is irrelevant. They have always existed
and, indeed, for centuries have often sold themselves to
the highest bidder in one war or another. But “combating
bandits in the south in order to solidify the unity of
the nation” didn't mean those people; it meant anyone
who resisted the unity of the new nation. Who were they? For one, the exiled
Bourbons. After capitulation at the siege of Gaeta in
February 1861, the king and queen, many in the
government as well as a number of officers and soldiers
in the Bourbon army went to Rome where they lived as
guests of the Pope. (The ex-king of Naples, Francis II,
disbanded his government-in-exile in 1867.) [See these
entries: (1) and (2) on the presence of the
Bourbon royal family in Rome.] Then, there was the large
body of peasants in the south, those who had welcomed
Garibaldi as an egalitarian revolutionary and who looked
forward to an end of the last absolute monarchy in
Europe as well as the end of the almost feudal agrarian
system where the absentee elite owned the land and
peasants worked it for them. Garibaldi handed over his
conquests (all of southern Italy) to the king, Victor
Emanuel II of Piedmont and Sardinia, and went home, no
doubt thinking that political rulers of the new Italy
would keep his egalitarian promises for him. (Garibaldi
was a superb commander of men on the field of battle,
but all he knew of politics was that he was pretty sure
it started with the letter “P”.) Then, you had the real
bandits, many of whom had fought for Garibaldi and who
now hoped for commissions in the new Italian National
Guard. None of that happened, and, thus, you had an
angry population, disappointed with the outcome of the
revolution, encouraged by Bourbons in exile, themselves
bolstered by the wishful thinking of the Vatican and
Catholic nations of Europe that the new Italy would not
last.

Scene from Li chiamarono banditi

The 1860shave been described—depending on the source—as a civil war,
a peasant rebellion, or a time when savage bandits
roamed the countryside and had to be put down. The war
on banditry was sanctioned by the Pica Law, which went
into effect on August 15, 1863 and lasted until December
31, 1865. It defined itself as “an exceptional and
temporary measure of defense.” Essentially, it put the
southern half of the nation under martial law and under
the command of a military governor, who had the power to
set up military tribunals, summarily execute armed
rebels and unarmed civilians alike, and carry out
reprisals against non-combatant supporters of banditry.
The “army of pacification” in the south was about
120,000 men, about half of the entire Italian national
army. It was a time of extreme violence, a period in
which more Italians died than in all of the “Wars of
Independence.” Estimates run as high as one million,
many of them villagers guilty of “supporting banditry.”
Entire villages were either razed or depopulated in the
attempt to cut the bandits off from their peasant base.
Modern historians from the south do not hesitate to use
the phrase “crimes against humanity.” In modern times, there has grown up
in the south a “bandit romanticism,” telling the untold
story, as it were, of the Robin Hoods who fought the
good fight against the northern invaders and lost. A
film, Li chiamarono
banditi [They Called Them Bandits], a 1999 film
directed by Pasquale Squitieri, is a good example. (The
scene in the image from the film, above, is of a mass
execution of villagers in reprisal for their having
helped bandits.) It is based on the life of the very
real bandit, Carmine Crocco. He started out in the
Bourbon army, left it and joined the forces of
Garibaldi, then became the most successful of the
disappointed bandit resisters to the new Italy, at times
leading an army of 2000 and occasionally defeating the
Italian regular army in pitched battle. In the film, he
dies gloriously in the open field against the Piemontese
invaders. In real life, he was captured, sentenced to
death, had the sentence commuted to life, and died in
prison in 1905. He left an auto-biography, Come divenni brigante
[How I became a Bandit]. In any event, after the
dissolution of the Bourbon government-in-exile and after
Rome became the capital of the new Italy, the cause was
lost, national unity was secure, and “bandits” joined
the obscure footnotes of history.sources
& further reading -"Brigandage: The Brigands
of South Italy." New York Times, October 16,
1868. - Davis, John A. Conflict and Control: Law
and Order in Nineteenth-Century Italy,
London, Macmillan. 1988. - Dickie, John. A World at War: The
Italian Army and Brigandage 1860-1870.
History Workshop, No. 33 (Spring, 1992),
pp. 1-24, Oxford University Press. - Leeds, Christopher. The Unification of Italy.
Wayland Press, Brown University, Providence, RI. 1974. - Riall, Lucy. The Italian Risorgimento.
Routledge. 1994